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Lights in the sky

February 22, 2007

By Nick Lomb

Sydney Observatory often receives reports from the public about mysterious and unexplained sightings in the sky. Many of these are fireballs, which are small rocks from space hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burning up brightly as they reach the denser parts of the atmosphere about 30 or 40 km above the ground. Others turn out to be aeroplane vapour trails, ‘dump and burn’ manoeuvres by Air Force aircraft, satellites, weather balloons or even exploding rockets or rockets venting fuel.

We invite you to report your observations here at the bottom of this page. Other people may wish to comment on your observations if they have seen the same object or seen something similar at another time.

When leaving your observations please give as much detail as you can including

– Where you were – reports without a location will not be posted
– The time
– The direction you were looking (north, east, south, west or in-between)
– How high up you were looking (horizon is 0° elevation, half way up is 45° and directly overhead is 90°)
– How long you saw the object
– The direction the object was moving
– Whether it was clear or cloudy
– Whether you could see the Moon or Venus or any other astronomical object
– Describe what you saw

We welcome reports from around the world, however we are unable to respond to international reports.

Yanko, Your app should show that Corona Borealis is at about 15-18 degrees above the NE horizon at 04:00am on the 18th Feb. At that time the brightest object after the Moon should be Venus, very low on the eastern horizon. The next brightest object was Jupiter at 30-degrees above due east. Perhaps it is the combination of Venus, Saturn and the stars of Sagittarius that have caught your attention – see our Facebook post of 18 Feb 2019?

Between nightfall and around 7.30 pm tonight I witnessed a strange light in the sky. I was sitting on my patio on 68 Stanhill Drive, Chevron Island, Gold Coast Queensland. A friend of mine, Sue Minturn, exclaimed,
“ What is that light in the sky?”
She had seen a “ white light” descend rapidly vertically across the face of Sirius. Responding to her, I picked up what appeared to me as a constant orange dot descending as rapidly as a falling star in a perfect vertical trajectory down the evening sky in line with Sirius. The object continued in this way as I managed to capture it on my smartphone. Not long after this we picked up another orange non flashing light dot, running perpendicular to the first in horizontal equivalence to the moon.
Neither light flashed and the second light seemed much slower than the first. Neither light flashed and neither had any tail of any kind. The date was 18/01/19

I saw 3 lines like Aeroplane vapour trail, but its was purple in colour at the time of 5:50 AM . And the lines were not close to each other . The direction was 115° E
10°12’58″N 76°16’57″E on the date of 3 january 2019. At the place Mala in Thrissur district in Kerala,India.
There was moon of waning cresent phase.
And some stars . Moon and one star looks like symbol of muslims some logo ( sorry I don’t know how to explain it)
And there was some stars and I dont know wether it was a satellite or not .